Since the appearance of the Princess Leia holographic message in the 1970's Star War movie, researchers have been exploring the feasibility of producing a real world prototype. In recent years, similar excitement has been stirred up in the community with the “Three Dimensional (3-D) forensic chamber” in the television series “Bones”.
With the advancement of computers, digital holography has become an area of interest and has gained some popularity. Research findings derived from digital holography technology enables holograms to be generated with numerical means and displayed with holographic devices such as a liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) display. Holograms generated in this manner can be in the form of numerical data that can be recorded, transmitted, and processed with digital techniques. On top of that, the availability of high-capacity digital storage and wide-band communication technologies also are leading to the emergence of real-time video holography, casting light on the potential future of three-dimensional (3-D) television system.
Currently, development in digital holography has reached some degree of maturity. However, conventional digital holography can involve a relatively high amount of computation to generate an object scene, and this can impose a significant bottleneck (e.g., level of restriction or impediment) in practical applications. While some analytic methods have been proposed recently in an attempt to overcome this issue, with such conventional techniques, the shortening in the computation time may not be significant when the object scene is composed of a relatively large number of object points.
The above-described description is merely intended to provide a contextual overview of generating digital holograms, and is not intended to be exhaustive.